Make a Wet Felted Wool Curly-que

This is a video tutorial, detailing how to make a wet felted wool curl. This is a great element that can be added to jewelry or other decorative stuff. It is a really useful thing to know how to make, because they can add a much needed organic feel to a design that is starting to feel too static. I love them and thought that I would share.

Here is what you will need for this simple wet felting project:

Wool roving
A pipe cleaner
A felting surface (like ribbed shelf liner)
Soap
Really hot water
bamboo skewer

The first step is that you have to get the wool roving onto the pipe cleaner core, in a way that facilitates felting it.

Now you are going to actually do the wet felting...get your soapy hot water ready!

The microscope photo is of a single wool fiber. I wanted you to be able to see what is going on when you dunk that wool in the hot soapy water. See those scales on the fiber? They are the cuticle of the fiber. Your hair has a cuticle too, it acts like shingles on a roof, protecting the hair or in this case, wool of the sheep. When you put the fiber in the hot soapy water, the cuticle scales open up and grab onto one another, and as they cool, they close, tightening the bond. Doing this repeatedly, along with agitiation which smashes the fibers together, is what creates felt.
(I'm a bio teacher, btw, so that is where I took the photo, gotta love it when school and art come together)

Now you are going to take your felt from being a boring bit of felt around a wire, to a dynamic curl shape. You could shape this in other ways of course, that is up to you.